The day started off pleasantly enough:

But at 2:39 in the afternoon he tweeted a rather more ominous message:

He tweeted again in the next few minutes (titling them simply “Uh-oh” and “Snaking its way down…”). Each tweet was accompanied by a photograph showing the progress of the tornado:

Then Mr. Fry’s tweeting ceased. This caused a bit of a sit in the Twitterverse—had he been swallowed up by the meteorological menace? Eventually, just over a half-hour later, Mr. Fry returned to reassure everyone:

Whew! And here we have another example of what a wondrous future we live in, wherein a man armed only with an iPhone and a Twitter account can give an immediate account of astounding weather phenomena. We don’t have to rely on the hope that someone caught some footage of it that might make it to the local news that evening, which might then possibly be picked up by a national news (or perhaps end up as footage in Mr. Fry’s Louisiana project a while down the road). Instead the connection is instant between the witness and the audience, without need for any pesky middle-men sticking their thumbs in it.

It also helps that I just so happen to have an incredible fascination with tornadoes.

I was a space fighter pilot in Earth’s space military: Ensign Chris Harris.

The enemy planet had been doing crazy stuff with genetic engineering, and I somehow discovered that they’d genetically engineered the “Perfect Pilot.” Well, an enemy fighter pilot (who was himself a genetically engineered person called a “Protoform” – but nobody from Earth knew what a “Protoform” was yet) decided to defect to Earth’s side and stole the Perfect Pilot, who had just been created and therefore was a newborn baby. A couple of my teammates and I arranged to sneak the Protoform and the baby into Earth territory.

We all met in a small, white room. It looked like it a cross between an airlock, a medical bay, and a locker room. The defector handed the baby over to one of my teammates, a woman, who started checking it over to make sure it was healthy and whatnot.

The defector was completely covered from head to toe, wearing a tight black bodysuit with silver stripes on it and a helmet that looked a lot like a cross between Samus’s helmet (from the Metroid Games) and a motorcycle helmet with a tinted visor, disallowing us from seeing his face. He and I were talking about something—I don’t remember what—when suddenly he said, “Oh. Oh, geez. Whoops!” He flipped up his visor and we watched in amazement as a completely featureless face very rapidly morphed into an exact replica of my face (except without a beard, because I didn’t have a beard in the dream).

The defector explained that he was a “Protoform”: a genetic blank slate of a person. He had accidentally “imprinted” himself with me and became my exact genetic duplicate; He looked and sounded exactly like me.

I got the idea to let the Protoform take my place so that I could raise the Perfect Pilot baby. I forged a new identity for myself as an ace mechanic and forged adoption papers for the baby. But I knew I would need help, and so I got someone to co-sign the adoption papers with me: Ensign Xavia Nova Olson, Earth’s most kick-ass space fighter pilot.

We raised the baby together for five years, at which point someone in the military took a closer look at our situation due to the fact that this five-year-old kid was already a better pilot than ANYONE else. So they discovered what we’d done, but even though they were pretty angry it was too late to really do anything about it since we’d raised the kid from infancy. And the Protoform (as “Chris Harris”) had proven himself to be an invaluable member of Earth’s military. So we only got stern reprimands but no real punishment. They just kinda wagged their fingers and said, “Well, you really shouldn’t have done that.”

That’s around the time that I woke up.

It was an interesting dream, but I could tell my dream people were kinda grasping at straws at various points. A lot of the scenery was taken straight out of Star Wars and the above-mentioned animé series. The term “Protoform” is actually from a couple of different incarnations of The Transformers. It’s what a Transformer is before it has an alternate mode, so it was kinda applicable to the defector’s genetic blank-slate state. And when my dream needed someone to help me raise the baby, my dream people went, “Quick, which one of Chris’s friends has the most science-fiction-sounding name!?” and came up with Xavia Nova Olson, whose name does indeed sound like it coulda come from Gundam Wing.

When I woke up I had the feeling that I was really only maybe halfway through the dream. I had the feeling that in the second half of the dream the enemy planet would have figured out where their Perfect Pilot had disappeared to and would have attacked us to try to get him back, and there would probably have been some big action scene and it would have turned out that one of my superior officers was the traitor who tipped off the enemy planet.

What happened was this: Obama was in Seattle. Wherever the president goes there’s very restrictive airspace rules; you can’t fly within a certain radius of him, etc. This is to prevent suicide pilots from crashing into whatever building/vehicle he happens to be in. Well, some doofus who probably didn’t even know that POTUS was in town was putting around in his little pontoon boat and strayed into restricted airspace. Immediately two F-15s were scrambled from the Portland area, and pushed over 800 MPH to intercept the offending airplane. Going that fast makes some gigantic sonic booms, which were heard for a couple hundred miles in every direction (I think the booms actually formed between Olympia and Tacoma).

In the moments immediately after the booms, though, nobody knew what had caused them. I walked outside and saw that everybody else (who was home in the afternoon) was also standing outside their houses. “Any ideas?” I called out to a neighbor.

“Nope,” was the reply.

Carrie got on the laptop and looked at the news websites: King 5, Komo 4, Google News, Tacoma News Tribune, etc. But this had happened only maybe a minute earlier, so there was no actual news yet.

So then I remembered that we live in the future, and I got on the computer and logged into Twitter. I typed “Tacoma” into the search bar and sat there while the tweets started pouring in from every corner of Puget Sound, from Olympia to Seattle and beyond. Immediately the two rumors were (A) some sort of gas explosion and (B) some sort of sonic boom. After a short while tweeters quickly realized that if it were an explosion then someone would have actually witnessed it and tweeted about it, which didn’t happen. So a pair of sonic booms seemed more likely. Eventually re-tweets started coming through about official word from the FAA being sonic booms. And then quickly the real story started taking shape on twitter long before it ever appeared on any news website.

This is what it’s like to live in the future. Instant information about any major event from those who witnessed the event. Sure, you have to sift through the speculation and rumors, but you don’t have to wait around and wonder what happened until the 5:00 news that evening anymore. News comes directly from the witnesses now.

That’s (counter-clockwise from left) teriyaki salmon, sauteéd spinach with salami and onions, and cucumber sunomono. What’s sunomono, you ask, and how do I know how to make it? EXCELLENT QUESTION! I learned all about it from my good pal’s new Japanese food blog, Cooking Japan.

Here’s the recipe! It’s absurdly simple to make, and it tastes frikkin’ fantastic. It’s light and cool and crisp, perfect for a hot summer day, and it goes great with teriyaki.

I really wanna make the salmon miso-yaki and the salt-broiled salmon.

Link of the Month:
Sin Titulo
Sin Titulo (”Without Title”) is a very absorbing and fascinating urban fantasy/horror webcomic by Cameron Stewart. Started in 1997, it is now over 100 pages long, and has still only scratched the surface of its central mystery. Don’t believe me that it’s worth reading? Well, it just won an incredibly prestigious Eisner Award for “Best Digital Comic 2010.” Read it from the beginning; it is very rewarding.

Album of the Month:
Locust Street Taxi – Mr. Brown
This latest release from Locust Street Taxi is by far their most polished album. The production values are fantastic but not in a way that draws attention to itself. Still at the forefront are the jazz/swing/pop/ska rhythms, the flashy brass, and the quirky and often funny lyrics though which Locust Street Taxi has garnered quite a bit of a following. Standout tracks on the album include (but are not limited to) “Stuff,” “Mango,” and “Get Back Home.”

DVD of the Month:
Look Around You: Season 1
My all-time favorite parody of late-1970s and early-1980s British educational films and school programs. It succeeds because it strikes the perfect balance of being extremely accurate to its influences (right down to the horrible synthesizer music and authentic-looking film stock) as well as being absolute nonsense. I absolutely adore it. This is parody done 100% correctly.

Please, everyone, go and read the article I wrote six years ago about proper garage sale etiquette, and please pay special attention to the section on how to properly make and put up signs for your sale. It’s really extraordinarily simple, but it’s shocking how few people get it even remotely right.

Proper Garage Sale Etiquette

For your own sake and for the sake of the crap you wanna get rid of, this has been a public service announcement. Thank you.

OCTOCAM

If you ever, ever want to know what an octopus is doing right this very second, Oregon State University’s Hatfield Marine Science Center has installed a camera in the tank of their resident 40-pound Pacific octopus, Deriq.

It is for some reason very enjoyable and relaxing to watch Deriq meander around in his tank.

ALT/1977: WE ARE NOT TIME-TRAVELERS

Artist Alex Varanese has imagined what it would look like if someone from today went back in time and re-created today’s modern electronics—cell phone, laptop, hand-held video game system, mp3 player—using the design aesthetics of 1977.

The results are absolutely fan-frikkin’-tastic.

I was born in 1977, so I completely remember this style of design. Y’all have no idea how much I miss high technology that had a faux-woodgrain finish. Glorious.

EDWARD CULLEN TAMPON CASE

Etsy crafter and all-around awexome human being Taisha McGee made the one piece of merchandise that no Twilight fan should be without.

The product description speaks for itself:

Bella’s most useful accessory. Case is 5.5″ by 2″ and holds two average sized tampons. Edward’s face is sparkly. Tampons not included.

RIVER TAM AND THE FIREFLIES

Holy eff but that is so freakin’ adorable. This is an actual album sleeve that artist Joebot made for a gallery show (happens on July 9th).

But the really cool thing is that you can purchase a print of this picture at his Etsy shop as a gift to send to me! Joebot has some other really cool prints as well, like ones of the Nintendo princesses (and Samus).

AT-AT DAY AFTERNOON

An absolutely adorable short film with seamless special effects animation. Very well done.

THE WORLD’S ONLY NEWSPAPER

This is a fascinating collection of still frames and clips of people reading newspapers in dozens of films and television shows. The exact same newspaper each time. Going back decades. It looks like this:

It’s actually kind of astonishing how wide-spread this newspaper really is.

AQUATIC VIDEOS

Here are a couple of videos of aquatic awesomeness:

WATERMELON TURTLE

This extravagantly cute melon bowl is from my link-of-the month, Host-It Notes.

There are all sorts of other darling little foodstuffs at Host-It Notes, like sheep cupcakes, mushroom radishes, and frosting bees!

That’s about it for now.

Link of the Month:
Host-It Notes
You may know that Carrie & I, on the occasions that we do host shindigs, like to go the extra mile to really make ‘em something. Host-It Notes is a fantastic aggregator blog that links to all sorts of fantastic tips, tricks, and ideas for making your next gathering or hootenanny (just a little bit of hoot and a whole lotta nanny) be a little bit more memorable. Eat your heart out, Martha.

Album of the Month:
Bitter:Sweet – Drama
I’m really digging Bitter:Sweet. I don’t know exactly how to categorize this duo. Electro-lounge? Downbeat-jazz-groove? I dunno. I like it a lot because it sounds like it should be the soundtrack to an old-school spy movie, which, as you might know, is one of my favorite genres of both film and music. This 2008 album is chock-full of groovy, smoove, horn-driven, slinky, spy-sounding songs. I likes it.

DVD of the Month:
Justice League: Crisis on Two Earths
Probably my favorite of the post-JLU DC Animated films, Crisis on Two Earths is surprisingly well done and entertaining. It’s the story of an alternate-universe Earth where the analogues of the Justice League are members of the villainous Crime Syndicate. A good Lex Luthor finds his way to the Justice League’s Earth and recruits them to help free his universe from their tyrannical grip. I really appreciated the way the filmmakers just assume that if you’re watching this movie then you’re already familair with the main members of the Justice League, so there’s no need for lengthy “get-to-know” sequences for them. By far the highlight of the movie is James Woods as the completely absolutely nihilistic Batman analogue, Owlman.